Attention, public: mothers must be judged as much as possible. Here's how.

“That’s not tuna you’re eating, is it? Did you know that tuna is composed entirely of mercury? Um, so, do you care about your unborn child?”

“Did you just order a turkey sandwich? Ever heard of a bacterium called listeria? Well, you better find out all about it, missy, because from now until that poor innocent baby is born, your thoughtless snacking can kill. No more cold cuts for you. Or brie. Forget brie. Don’t even think about goat cheese. If you care about anything except yourself. And I hope that’s decaffeinated tea you’re drinking.”

“Listeria? I ate a salami sandwich every day and you turned out fine. Don’t be an idiot. Eat this prosciutto while I stand here and watch you. Eat it eat it eat it. Your child needs protein. Jerk.”

“Did you just take a sip of your husband’s beer? I happen to have in my hands twelve separate studies that show that as little as two grams of alcohol a month can cause your child’s brain to resemble, in size and personality, a walnut. Why do you want your baby to be walnut-brained? And vanilla extract counts, so hand over that cookie.”

“Your baby needs you to relax, so I’ve mixed you a special vitamin-packed Manhattan. Don’t talk to me about studies—when I had my kids, I drank Johnny Walker every day and smoked unfiltereds while I drove with the seatbelt off. And most of them lived, am I right? I mean, I don’t want to call you a gutless whore, but come on.”

“You’re only six months pregnant? Wow. I thought you were, like, more pregnant. I only gained 11 pounds with my kids. Wow. Um. Wow.”

“Have you gained enough? You know, they’re now discovering that you need to gain at least 35 pounds, or your child will be an asshole.”

“You’re getting an epidural, I assume. You know you’ll never be able to handle the indescribably blinding pain. You’re not going to try to prove something with that whole natural-childbirth hoo-ha, I hope. Please tell me you’re not going to prove something and that you’ll just take the nice drugs the nice doctors give you. What’s that? Oh, sweet Christ, what’s a ‘midwife’?”

“Of course it’s your choice, but I’ve read some alarming statistics on children whose mothers had epidurals. It seems they’re 89% more unloved, and 116% less happy for the rest of their lives. I’ve already emailed the studies to you. But I guess if a little pain is more important to you than your child’s happiness, you have to factor that in.”

“You’re only nursing for the first few weeks, right? After that it’s more about you trying to prove something, you know. Bottles are easier. Look at him—he’s got no idea what to do with those tits you keep shoving at his face. Are you trying to turn him into a gay?”

“Nursing is difficult, you say? I have no idea what you could mean. Mastitis? I think I remember having that. About seven times or so. Once I had a 106 fever, but I kept nursing little Dakota, no matter what. Did I tell you about when I was in that accident, and I was pinned under a tractor-trailer, and I had the paramedics bring me my baby so that I could nurse her as they sawed off my leg? Well, I mean, what choice did I have?”

“I hope your baby is sleeping in bed with you. Do you know what happens if she doesn’t? She stares all night at the bars of her cold, dank crib, trembling in fear and wondering why her mummy and daddy hate her so much that they’d put her in prison.”

“You’ve got that poor little thing in the bed with you? Are you trying to kill him?”

“Your baby cries all the time? Obviously you’re doing something wrong.”

“Your baby never cries? You got lucky. When your first child is easy, studies have shown that the second child is 99% more likely to drive you clinically insane with his ceaseless shrieking. So wipe that smile off your face. Yeah, that’s right.”

“Are you still letting that child fall asleep while she’s feeding? You know that you’re being selfish, lazy, and possibly criminal in your neglect of her sleep training. You need to leave her alone and let her cry it out. Right now.”

“What do you mean, ‘sleep training’? You’re not reading that Ferber book, I hope. I’ve read that if you let your child cry for more than 2.7 minutes, he’ll only learn that you hate him. You hate him, and want to sell him. To Dr. Ferber. Who, incidentally, you know what I heard about him? He eats babies. I’m just saying.”

“Don’t you think it’s a little selfish, being a stay-at-home mother? It’s not like he even knows who you are at this point. Or is it that you like staying in your pajamas all day and not showering? So your kid is an excuse, is what you’re saying? Nice.”

“You’re going back to work? I see. So you value your career more than your child, whom you’re abandoning so that he can be raised by strangers. Well, bully for you.”

“Lighten up—a little TV is good for kids. That’s why, when I was babysitting, I let him stay up late with me and watch some Cinemax. He learned some great new words!”

“You let your son watch ‘Sesame Street’? Huh. So I guess you’re fine with it if your kid lives in a fantasy world, where muppets bathe with each other and the number 8 tangos with the letter H. Incidentally, your cavalier parenting just caused his SAT scores to plummet 104 points. Bravo.”



(I'm sure I'll have more in a few months.)

Just because your child is sleeping through the night doesn’t mean you have to: a guide.

3:30 a.m. The dog is barking! Wake up!

3:31 a.m. Where? What? Who? Charlie’s woofing like mad at nothing. You whisper, “Shh, Charlie. Shh. Shh. SHHH,” even though this has never, in your five years with Charlie, stopped him from barking. If anything, he seems to consider it some form of cheerleading. But you have to do something, so there it is.

3:33 a.m. Charlie gets himself back under the covers, turns a few times, tucks his cold front paws between your butt-cheeks, and instantly begins snoring. You move the paws out of the way, but you know they’ll be back in a minute. They always come back.

3:35 a.m. You’re still awake.

3:40 a.m. You’re still awake.

3:47 a.m. Is your husband awake? Nope. Did he sleep through the barking? It seems he did.

3:50 a.m. You stare at your husband for a while. He’s still sleeping. You hate him just a little.

4:00 a.m. Don’t be like that. Someday he’ll be gone. Or… you’ll be gone.

4:00:03 a.m. Don’t start thinking about death, you idiot.

4:01 a.m. Death. Cold, inevitable death. Soon—and forever.

4:03 a.m. Well, not soon soon. Sort of soon. Soon in relation to the universe.

4:04 a.m. Really soon in relation to the universe. Jeez--! Holy--!

4:05 a.m. Calm down. Longevity runs in the family. Think of your great-aunt, who lived to be almost 100. Decide you’re going to be just like her, in your Sutton Place apartment, walking to work every day in your little suit and pillbox hat.

4:07 a.m. Of course, you’ll also be alone, getting shorter and shorter as your spine slowly crumbles. You’ll write peculiar letters to your relatives accusing them of not feeding you at last year’s Thanksgiving. “The plates kept getting passed over my head,” you’ll write, in your spidery old-person handwriting. “I thought it bad-mannered to say anything, so I made do with some crackers.”

4:10 a.m. But who’s to say you’d live that long? It would be a privilege to live long enough to get that dotty.

4:11 a.m. Who’s to say you’ll live past tomorrow?

4:15 a.m. Don’t be ridiculous. You’ll live a long, healthy life. Go to sleep.

4:16 a.m. But people do get killed. There are random accidents. It could happen. To you.

4:17 a.m. Take a few minutes to consider, in agonizing detail, the horrific events that could lead to your sudden, unexpected demise.

4:25 a.m. Wow, that was a little too vivid.

4:26 a.m. Feel a little queasy. Are you coming down with something?

4:27 a.m. Decide that your ability to imagine these events so very well can mean only one thing: you’re psychic.

4:28 a.m. Wow. Psychic.

4:29 a.m. Good going, psychic lady. You just premonitioned…premonized…premonitated…foresaw your own doom, and now Henry’s going to grow up without a mother, and he’s going to forget all about you.

4:30 a.m. No! No! AIIIIEEE--

4:35 a.m. –EEEAIIIIIIIGH---

4:45 a.m. hurk hurk hurk hurk

4:50 a.m. sniffle. Sob. Sniffle. Snork. AIIIEEE—

5:00 a.m. This is getting serious, now. You need to sleep. You like to sleep. Find a way to calm down.

5:04 a.m. Okay. Okay. Listen. Decide that your ability to imagine some horrific death only means that you have an active imagination. (Probably.) You can imagine all kinds of things that will never come to pass.

5:05 a.m. Like a foot growing out of the side of Henry’s head.

5:07 a.m. Poor little foot-head! How could those kids taunt him like that?

5:10 a.m. Would it move? Would he put a hat on it, or a sock? Or a sock hat? Or a sock with a hat on it but how could a sock wear a hat and what about when he graduates how will the mortarboard fit and hi there lil foot-head want to try out for soccer zzzzzzzzzzzzzz.

Does the Bumper Bonnet come in adult sizes?

At the playground this morning, Henry head-butted me, without warning or provocation, smack dab in the mouth. I was holding him (obviously; he’s not that tall yet) and chatting with an acquaintance, so when I first felt the impact I thought someone had playfully chucked a bowling ball at my teeth. Before I could have a second thought, tears began springing from my eyes; Henry was also bawling (why did her hard teeth hurt me like that?) and the acquaintance stared and asked, “Why is your face wet?” and I said, “Those are called tears,” and she said, “You hu-mans are so complicated,” and with that she glided away on her titanium casters and Henry and I sobbed all the way back to our apartment where we ate cream cheese and pumpkin spread on toast and felt a little better.

Now for some related trivia:

1. My acquaintance is not really a robot! She has feet, not casters.

2. I always want to write the past tense of “glide” as “glid.” Why isn’t that right? Has anyone looked into this?

3. Henry has hit me way harder than this before. His head-buttings have caused facial bruising and even a (slightly) bloody nose. Yet after those brutal assaults, I remained tear-free. I cry at everything else, though.

4. Once I cried at a tampon commercial.

5. A girl was trying out for the cheerleading squad, and she was sure she wouldn’t get in, but then—she did! I’m not sure how it related to tampons.

Babies don't sleep, but then they do.

Our friends’ baby Tallulah is now eight weeks old. She’s kicking her parents’ asses with her newborn I’m-a-baby-so-I’ll-think-I’ll-cry-instead-of-sleep attitude, but—and this is important—she’s not mine, so I feel pretty relaxed about it. I recently said to them, “Boy, these first few weeks sure have gone by quickly!” and they were like, hmm, it’s been crawling by for us, what with the sleep deprivation and the, you know, crying. And then I mentioned how Henry sleeps 13 hours a night, and takes a two-hour nap every day, and how that day we all overslept because we forgot to set the alarm and Henry didn’t wake up until 10 a.m., and, well, it turns out that wasn’t something they wanted to hear. New parents are so sensitive.

Actually, I think our tales of Henry’s record-breaking sleep habits cheer them up, because I’m sure that they, like the we of 16 months ago, don’t really believe that Tallulah will ever, ever sleep through the night. Luckily we are here to give hope to the hopeless, perspective to the not-perspective-having.

Until Henry was around 4 months old, Scott and I were so sleep-deprived, we were probably clinically insane. Henry would sleep for, say, 45 minutes at a time, then wake up and remain awake--awake and pissed off--for hours. I would tell people that I now understood child abuse, then I would shriek “JUST KIDDING!” and laugh maniacally until they backed away. I spent all day graphing charts of Henry’s sleep and then staring at the paper as if a 3-D solution would eventually wobble into view.

We were tired.

Turns out that not sleeping makes you stupid, too. Scott and I fought all the time, but we were such morons that it was hard to take our conflicts seriously. We would have the kind of asinine, confused fights that you might have with someone if you’ve both just been awakened in the middle of the night and you’re trying to communicate some kind of dream-agenda, although you can no longer recall what you’ve said as soon as you’ve said it. Our fights went a little like this:

Setting: The living room. 7 p.m. I’m staring longingly into an empty brownie pan. Husband is glaring at the TV. Henry has just fallen asleep in his car seat.

Me: Did you do that thing? The, um…

Him: What?

Me: You know…(sigh).

Him: Wha--? How would I know? Wha--?

Me [glaring]: The thing! The—Jesus, never mind.

Him: What are you saying?

Me: Shut UP.

Him: Don't tell me to--God!

Me [sobbing]: Shut up shut up! Shut up!

Henry wakes up.

Me: [incomprehensible syllables amid sobs]

Him: [kicking coffee table]

And now! Lookit lookit! Henry sleeps, and our fights have become more sophisticated, with completed thoughts and proper nouns! There are several ways that we could probably take credit for this, but in the end, he just needed to get a little bigger. I guess it happens that way for everyone, or else some of us would be 34 and still need to be rocked and swaddled every night. And that would be creepy.

On a somewhat related note, I love this quote (From a non-news story on President Taft, of all people: “Taft's Nodding Off Attributed to Illness”)—the article notes that President Taft “was the most obviously sleepy person to ever inhabit the White House.” Apparently other presidents, like, say, Rutherford B. Hayes,* were drowsier, but better able to hide it.

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*I love Rutherford B. Hayes.